Stone Mattress: Nine Tales Read online

  “Look who just croaked,” says Jorrie now. “Big Dick Metaphor!”

  “That nickname could apply to a lot of men,” says Tin. “Though I assume you mean someone in particular. I can see your ears twitching, so he must be important to you.”

  “Three guesses,” says Jorrie. “Hint: He was at the Riverboat a lot, that summer when I was doing their bookkeeping, volunteer, part-time.”

  “Because you wanted to hang out with the bohemians,” said Tin. “I do have a vague recollection. So who? Blind Sonny Terry?”

  “Don’t be silly,” says Jorrie. “He was decrepit even then.”

  “I give up. I never went there much, it was too fetid for me. Those folksingers made a fetish of not bathing.”

  “That’s untrue,” says Jorrie. “Not all of them. I know it for a fact. No fair giving up!”

  “Who ever said I was fair? Not you.”

  “You should be able to read my mind.”

  “Oh, a challenge. All right: Gavin Putnam. That selfstyled poet you were so nuts about.”

  “You knew all along!”

  Tin sighs. “He was so derivative, him and his poetry both. Sentimental trash. Quite gruesomely putrid.”

  “The early ones were very good,” says Jorrie defensively. “The sonnets, except they weren’t sonnets. The Dark Lady ones.”

  Tin has slipped up, he’s been maladroit. How could he have forgotten that some of Gavin Putnam’s early poems had been about Jorrie? Or so she’d claimed. She’d been thrilled by that. “I’m a Muse,” she’d announced when the Dark Lady suite first appeared in print, or in what passed for print among the poets: a stapled-together mimeo magazine they put out themselves and sold to one another for a dollar. The Dirt, they’d called it, in a bid for grittiness.

  Tin found it touching that Jorrie was so excited by these poems. He hadn’t seen much of her that season. She had, to put it mildly, a hyperactive social life, due no doubt to the alacrity with which she flung herself into bed, whereas he’d been living in a tworoomer over a barbershop on Dundas and having a quiet sexual identity crisis while toiling away at his doctoral thesis.

  This was a solid enough but not honestly very inspired reexamination of the cleaner and more presentable epigrams of Martial, though what really drew him to Martial was his no-nonsense attitude towards sex, so much less complicated than that of Tin’s own era. For Martial, there was no romantic pussyfooting, no idealization of Woman as having a higher spiritual calling: Martial would have laughed his head off at that! And no taboos: everyone did everything with everyone: slaves, boys, girls, whores, gay, straight, pornography, scatology, wives, young, middle-aged, old, front, back, mouth, hand, cock, beautiful, ugly, and downright repulsive. Sex was a given, like food, and as such was to be relished when excellent and derided when substandard; it was an entertainment, like the theatre, and could thus be reviewed like a performance. Chastity was not the primary virtue, for men or for women either, but certain forms of friendship and generosity and tenderness did get top marks. His contemporaries labelled him as unusually sunny and goodnatured, nor did his scathing, acerbic wit do anything to diminish that perception. His criticisms were not directed at individuals, he claimed, but at types; though Tin had his doubts about that.

  But a thesis was not about why you appreciated your subject: in academia, he’d come to understand, that kind of thing should be reserved for social chit-chat. You had to cook up something more focused. Tin’s central hypothesis revolved around the difficulties of satire in an age lacking in shared moral standards, which Martial’s age did, in spades: he’d moved to Rome when Nero was in power. Indeed, was Martial a true satirist or just a smutty gossip, as some commentators had claimed? Tin intended to defend his hero against this charge: there was so much more to Martial, he would say, than cocks and boy-fucking and sluts and fart jokes! Though he would not of course use those crude vernacular terms in his thesis. And he’d do his own translations, updating the diction to fit Martial’s well-crafted slang, though the filthiest of the epigrams were prudently to be avoided: their time had not yet come.

  “You imitate youth, Laetinus, by dying your hair. Presto! Just now a swan, you’re now a raven. But you can’t fool everyone: Proserpina spots your grey hair, And she’ll yank your stupid disguise right off your head!” This was the tone he sought in his translations – contemporary, punchy, not stilted. He used to spend a week over one or two lines. But he doesn’t do that any more, because who cares?

  He’d received a grant for his doctoral studies, though it wasn’t large. Jorrie told him Classics was surely going to disappear very soon, and then how would he earn his living? He should have gone into Design, because he would have made a killing. But, said Tin, a killing was exactly what he didn’t want to make because to make a killing you had to kill, and he lacked the killer instinct.

  “Money talks,” said Jorrie, who despite her bohemian leanings wanted to have lots of it. She had no intention of toiling away in some tedious, soul-grinding factotum job, overworked and underpaid and a prey to oafs and thugs, the way their mother had. Her nascent vision involved flashy cars and vacations in the Caribbean and a closetful of figure-hugging fabrics. She hadn’t articulated that vision yet, not out loud, but Tin could see it coming.

  “Yes,” said Tin. “Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary.” Martial could have said that. Possibly Martial did say it. He would have to check. Aureo hamo piscari. To fish with a golden hook.

  The barbers on the ground floor of Tin’s building were three elderly misanthropic Italian brothers who did not know what the world was coming to except that it was bad. The shop had a rack of girlie magazines featuring police stories and pictures of hookers with enormous bosoms, which was what men were supposed to like. These magazines made Tin feel queasy – the spectre of Mother Maeve hovered rakishly above anything to do with black brassieres – but he got his hair cut there anyway as a goodwill gesture and leafed through the magazines while he waited. It didn’t do to be too openly gay then, and anyway he was still deciding; and the Italian barbers were his landlords and needed to be buttered up.

  He’d had to make it clear to them, however, that Jorrie was his twin sister, not a girlfriend of loose character. Despite their stash of lurid magazines, which they probably viewed as professional equipment, they were puritanical about any unsanctioned goings-on in their rental accommodations. They thought Tin was a fine, upstanding scholarly youth, called him The Professor, and kept asking him when he was going to get married. “I’m too poor,” Tin would say. Or “I’m waiting for the right girl.” Sage nods from the barbershop trio: both excuses were acceptable to them.

  So when Jorrie would arrive on her infrequent visits, the Italian barbers would wave to her through the window and smile in their triste way. How nice that The Professor had such an exemplary sister. It was what a family should be like.

  When the Dark Lady issue of The Dirt came out, Jorrie could hardly wait to share her Musehood with Tin. She’d galloped up the stairs, waving her hot-off-the-mimeo Dirt, and plumped herself down in his wicker basket chair.

  “Look at this!” she’d said, thrusting the stapled pages at him while sweeping back her long, dark hair with one hand. She had a swatch of red-and-ochre block-printed cloth wound around her trim waist, and a necklace of – what were those? Cow’s teeth? – dangling over her scoop-necked peasant blouse. Her eyes were shining, her bangles were jangling. “Seven poems! About me!”

  She was so sweet. She was so avid. If Tin hadn’t been her brother, if he’d been straight, he would have run a mile; but away from her or towards her? She was faintly terrifying. She wanted it all. She wanted them all. She wanted experiences. In Tin’s already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him.

  “You can’t be in a poem,” he’d said, crossly, because this infatuation of hers was worrying him. She was bound to cut herself on it: she was a clums
y girl, not skilful with edged tools. “Poems are made of words. They aren’t boxes. They aren’t houses. Nobody is in them, really.”

  “Nitpicker. You know what I mean.”

  Tin sighed, and at her insistence he sat down at his rickety third-hand pedestal table with the mug of tea he’d just made for himself and read the poems. “Jorrie,” he said. “These poems are not about you.”

  Her face fell. “Yes, they are! They have to be! It’s definitely my. …”

  “They’re only about part of you.” The lower part, he did not say.

  “What?”

  He sighed again. “You’re more than this. You’re better than this.” How could he put it? You’re not just a piece of cheap tail? No, too hurtful. “He’s left out your, your … your mind.”

  “It’s you who keeps on about mens sana in corpore sano,” she said. “Sane mind in a sound body, both together. I know what you’re thinking: that this is just about the sex. But that’s the point! I represent – I mean, she, the Dark Lady, she represents a healthy, down-to-earth rejection of the false, wispy, sentimental … It’s like D. H. Lawrence, that’s what he says. That’s what Gav loves about me!” And on she went.

  “So, in Venus veritas?” said Tin.

  “What?”

  Oh, Jorrie, he thought. You don’t understand. Men like that get tired of you once they’ve had you. You’re in for a fall. Martial, VII: 76: It’s only pleasure, it isn’t love.

  He was right about the fall. It was fast, and it was hard. Jorrie didn’t go into the details – she was too stunned – but what he pieced together at the time was that there was a live-in girlfriend, and she’d walked in on Jorrie and the Earthy Poet while they were disporting themselves on the sacrosanct domestic mattress.

  “I shouldn’t have laughed,” said Jorrie. “That was rude. But it was such a farce! And she looked so shocked! It must have seemed really mean to her, me laughing. I just couldn’t help it.”

  The girlfriend, whose name was Constance (“How prissy!” Jorrie snorted) and who was the embodiment of that very same wispiness and sentimentality so despised by the Poetaster – this Constance had gone white as a sheet, even whiter than she already was, and had said something about the rent money. Then she’d turned and walked out. Not even stomped: scuttled, like a mouse. Which just went to show how wispy she was. Jorrie herself would have done some hairpulling and slapping at the very least, she claimed.

  She had felt the departure of Constance ought to be a cause for celebration – the forces of vitality and life and the truths of the flesh had triumphed over those of abstractness and stagnation – but that had not been the outcome. No sooner had the HalfRhymer been barred from the moonmaiden’s chamber than he began caterwauling to get back in: he yowled for his vaporous Truelove like an infant deprived of its nipple.

  Jorrie was less than tactful about this excess of whimpering and regret – the words pussy-whipped and limp prick were thrown about by her with perhaps too much abandon – so her expulsion was inevitable. According to Mr. Poetaster, the imbroglio was suddenly all her fault. She’d tempted him. She’d seduced him. She was the viper in the orchard.

  There was something to that, Tin supposed; Jorrie had been the huntress, not the hunted. But still, it takes two to tango. The Minor Minnesinger could have said no.

  Short form, Jorrie had told him to shut up about Constance, and they’d had a fight about it, and Jorrie had been flung down onto the sewer grating of life like a used condom. No one had ever treated her like that before! His own heart wrenched with pity, Tin had tried to distract her – a movie, a drink, not that he could afford many of either – but she was not to be placated. There were no hysterics, no visible tears, but moping set in, followed by an ill-concealed, smouldering rage.

  Would she step over the edge? Would she confront the poet in public, scream, hit? She was angry enough for that. A cruel joke had been played on her, since her Musehood, once a source of pride and joy, had become a torment: the Dark Lady non-sonnets were now enshrined in Gavin’s first thin collection, Heavy Moonlight, and they sneered at Jorrie from its pages, mockingly, reproachfully.

  Worse, these poems accumulated gravitas as Gavin clambered up the ladder of acclaim, collecting the first in what was to be a string of minor but nonetheless career-enhancing prizes. Those early poems had been augmented by others, different in tenor: the lover recognized the mere fleshliness, indeed the grossness and fickleness of the Dark Lady, and returned to the pursuit of his pallidly glowing Truelove. But that ice-eyed paragon had declined to forgive the heartbroken lover, despite his overcrafted and bathosheavy and subsequently published pleas.

  These later poems did not reflect well on Jorrie. She’d had to look up the word trull in Tin’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. It was wounding.

  Jorrie went on a retaliatory stud-gathering riff, plucking lovers like daisies from every wayside ditch and parking lot, then casting them carelessly aside. Not that such behaviour ever has any effect on the one who’s spurned you, as Tin knows from his own experience: if it’s gone as far as that, they don’t care how much you debase yourself to get back at them. You could fuck a headless goat and it would make no earthly difference.

  But then the wheels of the seasons turned, and tender-fingered Dawn chalked up three hundred and sixty-two pink morning entrances, and then another year’s worth of them, and another; and the moon of desire rose and set and rose again, and so on and so forth; and the Poet of the Sprightly Prick receded into the dim and misty distance. Or so Tin hoped, for Jorrie’s sake.

  Though it seems he has not receded. All you have to do is kick the bucket and you’re right back in the memory spotlight, thinks Tin. He hopes the lingering shade of Gavin Putnam will prove a friendly one, supposing it is indeed lingering.

  Now he says, “Right, the Dark Lady sonnets. I remember them. Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder, but verse is cheaper: it certainly hooked you. You used to stagger into my barbershop enclave reeking of gutter sex, you stank like a week-old whitefish. You were cross-eyed over that dickhead the whole summer. I never could see it, myself.”

  “Because he never would show it to you,” says Jorrie. She laughs at her own joke. “It was well worth the sight. You’d have been jealous!”

  “Just don’t claim you were in love with him,” says Tin. “It was low, sordid lust. You were out of your mind on hormones.” He understands that kind of thing, he’s gone through similar infatuations. They’re always comic in the eyes of others.

  Jorrie sighs. “He had a great body,” she says. “While it lasted.”

  “Never mind,” says Tin. “It can’t be much of a great body any more, since it’s a corpse.” The two of them snicker.

  “Will you come with me?” says Jorrie. “To the memorial service? Have a gawk?” She’s putting on a jaunty air, but she fools neither of them.

  “I don’t think you should go. It would be bad for you,” says Tin.

  “Why? I’m curious. Maybe some of his wives will be there.”

  “You’re too competitive,” says Tin. “You still can’t believe some other woman elbowed you out and you didn’t win the prize pig. Face it, you two were never meant for each other.”

  “Oh, I know that,” says Jorrie. “We burnt out. Too hot to last. I just want to see the double chins on the wives. And maybe What’s-her-name will be there. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?”

  Oh please, thinks Tin. Not What’s–her–name! Jorrie’s still so knotted up over Constance, the live-in girlfriend whose mattress she’d defiled, that she won’t even pronounce her name.

  Unfortunately Constance W. Starr has not faded into obscurity as her wispiness ought to have dictated. Instead she’s become obscenely famous, though for a ludicrous reason: as C. W. Starr, she’s the author of a brain-damaged fantasy series called Alphinland. Alphinland has made such a vast shitload of money that Gavin the Relatively Penurious Poet must have been revolving in his grave decades before he actually died. H
e must have cursed the day he allowed himself to be led astray by Jorrie’s overheated estrogens.

  As the Starr star has risen, so has Jorrie’s own star faded: she no longer twinkles, she no longer monkey-shines. The C. W. Starr feeding frenzy generates long and clamorous lineups in bookstores on the publication days of new books, with children and adults both male and female dressed up like the villainous Milzreth of the Red Hand, or the blank-faced Skinkrot the Time-Swallower, or Frenosia of the Fragrant Antennae, the insect-eyed goddess with her entourage of indigo and emerald magic bees. All of this hoopla must get right up Jorrie’s nose, though she’s never confessed to having noticed.

  From the few times he’d accompanied Jorrie to the Riverboat, Tin has a vague memory of Alphinland’s unlikely genesis. The saga began as a clutch of ersatz fairy tales of the sword-and-sorcery variety, published in two-bit magazines of the kind featuring semi-naked girls on the covers being leered at by Lizard Men. The Riverboat hangers-on – especially the poets – used to make fun of Constance, but he guesses they don’t do that much any more. Money fishes with a golden hook.

  Of course he’s read the Alphinland series, or parts of it: he felt he owed it to Jorrie. In case she ever asks for his critical opinion, he can loyally tell her how bad it is. And of course Jorrie has read it too. She’d have been overcome by jealous curiosity, she wouldn’t have been able to restrain herself. But neither of them has admitted to having so much as cracked a spine.

  Happily, thinks Tin, Constance W. Starr is said to be somewhat of a recluse; more so since her husband died, a newspaper obituary Jorrie had passed over in silence. In a perfect world, C.W. Starr won’t turn up at the funeral.

  Odds of a perfect world? One in a million.

  “If this Putnam funeral is going to be all about Constance W. Starr,” says Tin, “I am definitely vetoing it. Because it will not be, as you say, a hoot. It will be very destructive for you.” What he doesn’t say: you’ll lose, Jorrie. The same way you lost the last time. She’s got the high ground.